Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman in Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and she had been, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came, and her earning days were over. Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became disturbed. The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to buy, had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California. In that State community property may even be given away, without the wife's knowledge or consent. It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property. His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained. This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge, but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could not afford it at all. It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work. They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work eleven hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even if the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. The right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protected in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husband is entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_.